boredom

The young man stood in the parking lot of the mall solitary like a lone tree in a forest, like a blade of grass through cement. An odd older man met with him. The man’s hair was a fright of white in all directions, a storm of chaos and white. The older man spoke of storms and light, of past and present tied together by fire and garbage, by an act of forgetting made by something from the sky. He was clearly madness in a jumpsuit.

The young man listened politely in the odd painted geometry of an empty parking lot. He adored the old man for his bottled madness in those gentle eyes, in a kind of suburban boredom snake bite antidote in those crooked yellowing teeth, those odd strung words hanging in the stale summer air like astronauts high above the earth. The suburb may have once been a utopic vision dreamt of fusing a 3 headed beast of farm, city and something skinned of lawns, tiny parks and street signs between, a lava molten notion at the end of that long horrid war but it died house by house, street by street. This town to the young man was clearly its grave and his street that last clutching , grasping spasm of an idea mutated into a dullness: ash in the mouth, guano in the eyes.

This guy. Grandpa and the adding machine. He acts like he does not come from a family forever tied to numbers, reciepts and nice shiny things. He smells at times like a brush fire in a garbage heap next to a Gin factory. His eyebrows radiate a strange kind of malignant evil when he tries to lecture. The little handbags under his eyes remind me when I tune out like this of the bags found at thrift stores with the smell of old things and failure along with the ghost of moth balls. He tries to rumple and stain just so but his posture radiates long rides in a car with a driver never spoken to.

He is winging it again. He may as well bring lecture notes in drawers from a bedroom or just tell us all teaching writing is an impotent fruitless pathetic wheels spinning in mud for infinity waste of time on a base even molecular level. He has something in his teeth. His eyes have that dead murder look again, oop, now like a ghost it is gone again. I could be eating lunch. I could be flossing.

But here we are.

Elliot Slarp’s note found on the floor at Naropa Institute one summer before he dropped out to “find himself”

Professor: William Burroughs

SECOND IN SERIES OF IMAGINED NOTES FROM CLASSES OF FAMOUS PEOPLE was last modified: February 15th, 2015 by Jeremy Hight

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